There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

Then we enter the construction zone. Here, muddy paths lead past tall stacks of pallets, chicken coops, piles of lumber, heaps of random junk, and smoldering fires. And everywhere are colorful asymmetrical tree-house-like structures that the children have designed themselves and built with a little help from Klaus. Some have one story; others have two. The only firm rule is that the structure must be safe. Many of them never get finished, but each becomes a unique fixture in this ever-growing ramshackle village of childhood dreams.

  “The houses actually get used very little after they are finished. For the kids it’s more about the process than the product,” Klaus says.

  Even if the children have a lot of freedom and the place may look chaotic and random, there is structure, and there are rules to follow. There’s a checkout system for the tools, and those who leave tools lying around are suspended from using them for a week. The children can come and go as they please, but those who have chickens or rabbits are responsible for their care.

  “We have animals here, so we need to come every day, otherwise they won’t get food or water,” a nine-year-old girl named Mia explains. “I love this place, especially the animals.”

  Not all SFOs are like Rainbow, but the place pretty well reflects the general attitude toward risk, freedom, and responsibility that prevails in Denmark. Having small accidents here and there, getting bruises and skinned knees, stepping on a nail, or cutting your hand are seen as normal parts of childhood. Even though the children here use real tools, climb trees, and start fires, all under little supervision, this is all seen as something that helps them manage risk, and serious injuries are rare at Rainbow.

  “In thirty years we’ve had maybe two broken legs. We explain to the parents from the start that our kids play with fire and use tools. If they can’t deal with that, they need to go to a different SFO,” Klaus says. “And I refuse to hear complaints about dirty or ruined clothes. If the kids smell bad and come home dirty, then you know they had fun.”

  After we leave, Aimie tells me about her mom, who let her play outside by herself from an early age, which set her on a path to a career in the National Park Service. For Aimie, a pivotal moment came when she compared the lives of children in Denmark with what was going on in her and Daniel’s own community in Orlando. Even though their neighborhood is gated and extremely safe, she rarely saw children playing outside.

  “I realized that I had to be proactive. Our mothers’ generation could be relaxed about it and just let us outside. But today in America you always have that fear that somebody will call the cops if you give your child too much freedom, so now we have to construct that reality for our children—for example, by creating nature play groups where we can set them free within the construct of what we’ve set up.”

  A Test for Maya

  * * *

  One of the after-school activities for children in our town was a gymnastics class in the school’s gym on Thursday evenings. There were two classes: one for preschoolers at four thirty, and one for the school-age children at a quarter past five. Both Maya and Nora wanted to go, and I figured they would just have to wait around for each other. Then I ran into Jenny, the mom of one of Maya’s classmates, Hannes, and his little brother, Love, who lived within walking distance from the school. She had other plans.

  “I was thinking that Hannes would stay home by himself while I go up to the little kids’ gymnastics with Love, and then he can walk himself to the gym. Maya is more than welcome to come and stay at our house after school and then they can walk together,” she said. “Hannes would love that!”

  She said it so matter-of-factly, as if it was a given that they could handle it. As if it was a given that this wouldn’t make her a bad parent. As if this was actually completely culturally acceptable. I had let the girls play unsupervised in the woods before, but since our home in the US was in the countryside, for them to walk places other than to the mailbox down the road had not really been an option. And I had never left them alone in the house, aside from when I had taken short walks with the dog.

  “Have you ever left him alone before?” I quizzed her.

  “Oh yeah, for about an hour or so at a time, while I’m out walking with Love or doing something nearby in town.”

  “Does he know how to lock up the house and all that kind of stuff?”

  I wasn’t sure what other “stuff” might be involved, just that this seemed like a big responsibility for an eight-year-old.

  “No. But he’ll figure it out.”

  Her confidence was contagious, so I told her that I would ask Maya, although I already knew what her answer would be.

  “I’m going to stay with Hannes by myself?”

  Her eyes widened and her face lit up with an incredulous smile.

  “Yes. Would you like to do that?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you think you can handle getting to gym class on time?”

  “Mmm . . . yeah,” she says, not at all convincingly.

  Either way, I decide to give it a try. When the first Thursday arrives, I go over to Jenny’s house so that we can prep them together. Before we leave, Jenny gives Hannes one last rundown in the hallway.

  “You need to lock the door when you leave. The key is over here, your gym clothes are over here,” she says, pointing first to the key rack on the wall, then to the gym bag on the floor by the door. “You need to leave at five after five to make it on time. Got it?”

  Hannes nods, although his gaze is wandering and it’s unclear whether he’s actually paying attention. Then both of them run back outside to play on the zip line that he’s just gotten for his birthday. And that’s where we leave them.

  It would be dark by the time they left, but Hannes lived less than a five-minute walk from the school, and the route they would take had no traffic. I was not particularly worried about them staying home by themselves or walking to the school. The worst thing that would likely happen was that they would lose track of time, making them tardy for the class. As I glance at the clock on the wall in the gym at ten after five, and Maya is nowhere to be found in the changing room, I’m starting to think that this is exactly what has happened. At close to fifteen minutes past five, I go outside to look for them. I can hear them before I see them, giggling and racing each other up the small hill by the soccer field behind the school.

  “We forgot to lock the house,” Maya shouts when she sees me, “so we had to go back!”

  They barely made it on time, but they did make it. By the time gym class season came to an end, a couple of months later, I didn’t think twice about giving Maya the responsibility to get there by herself. Before long, she and Nora were walking by themselves to their cousin’s house, a little over half a mile down the street from the Shack.

  It had all started with baby steps.

  Scandinavian Parenting Tip #6

  Refuse to give in to the culture of fear that has quashed outdoor play as we used to know it. Dare to trust your child and, as he matures, gradually give him more unsupervised time around the house, in the backyard, and in the neighborhood. Network with neighbors and other families to increase social trust in your community.

  Suggested reading: Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), by Lenore Skenazy. Jossey-Bass, 2010.

  7

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THERE IS A BETTER CONNECTION

  The mountains are calling and I must go.

  —JOHN MUIR

  Spring has been building steadily for a while when summer comes in with a bang in May. The forest explodes in a sea of green as budding leaves burst open with unfettered zeal almost overnight. A week ago I was wearing mittens; now children are running around barefoot and the roads are clogged with camper vans en route to the ocean. At the local cemetery, blooming daffodils, pinkster lilies, and pansies have replaced the simple pine branches that usually adorn the gravesites in the winter. Shaded by towering Scotch pines and with two purple pansies in my hands, I
walk down the paved path toward the spot where Farmor and Farfar, my paternal grandparents, lie buried. The girls are zigzagging through the gravesites eagerly searching for their headstone, but run right past the inconspicuous granite slab without noticing. The stone, a natural smooth rock with a pink tint, lies flat on the ground and is barely two feet wide. In front of it, ten yellow daffodils stretch toward the sun, next to a small sign that reads, maintained by the parish.

  I sit down in the damp, moss-riddled grass by the grave. Then it all comes back to me. I’m three years old and tumbling around in an adult-size navy-blue sweatshirt in a parklike green space, my family basking in the late-summer sun on the benches behind me. We’re in Swedish Lapland, 165 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and the sweatshirt belongs to my grandmother. During this trip, I would cross some of the most epic wilderness in Sweden in a carrier on my father’s back, and see the midnight sun hover over one of the most photographed mountain scenes in Sweden: Lapporten, a valley shaped like an enormous half-pipe carved out by a glacier during the last ice age. These images, and most everything else that happened during this trip, remain hazy and have only been partly reconstructed thanks to the mandatory vacation photo slide shows in my grandparents’ basement. I guess my three-year-old self only had so much appreciation for beautiful scenery. Instead, what I remember most clearly is my grandmother chasing me around and both of us laughing hysterically as I clumsily tried to make a getaway in her much-too-large shirt.

  At six foot two and 220 pounds, my grandfather was of imposing stature and had a perpetually tanned face full of wrinkles that ran deeper than ancient canyons. His steely hair was slickly combed backward in a style that remained the same from when he was a teenager until the day he died. He liked change about as much as a vegetarian enjoys a bloody steak and was punctual to a T, probably as a consequence of his lifelong career as a bus driver. He ran his bus like certain authoritarian leaders run countries, and had little interest in making jovial small talk with passengers. This, combined with his well-known annoyance with tipsy teenagers (he was a longtime teetotaler himself), eventually earned him the nickname Stone Face.

  As his only and much-adored grandchild, I rarely saw that side of him, aside from when he ranted about communism or the magpies that had hijacked his meticulously maintained bird feeders on the back porch.

  “Here, I have a surprise for you!” he would say, secretively stretching out his clenched right hand toward me. Then he’d slowly open it, revealing a handful of wild strawberries that he had picked fresh from the garden. “I saved them all for you.”

  If my grandfather could be a little crotchety, my grandmother, a seamstress working from home, was anything but. Submissive and good-natured, she never raised her voice to me. In fact, she rarely ever told me no. She spoiled me rotten and I knew it. But the toys and the cupboards that were always fully stocked with candy weren’t the main reason why I loved going to her and Grandpa’s house when I was little. It was because my grandmother gave me something way more precious—her undivided time and attention—and played with me like a peer. She never told me it was too cold to go outside; instead, she helped me dig tunnels through the snow. In the summer we played hopscotch in the driveway and badminton in the backyard. We went for walks around the neighborhood and ate fresh strawberries and ice cream on the porch. I was my grandmother’s world and she was mine.

  My grandparents were not exactly what you would call expert outdoor adventurers or hard-core environmentalists. They didn’t own any expensive gear. They were never particularly athletic. And they definitely didn’t dream of conquering any fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Still, the outdoors was a constant presence in their lives, and their relationship with nature was steady and loyal, not unlike the one that my grandfather had with Volvo cars and the evening weather forecast on TV.

  My grandfather died when I was in high school, but my grandmother lived until I was thirty-five years old. After she passed away in 2013 at age eighty-five, I went through the entire stockpile of old slides that she had kept on a shelf in her closet for years. The pictures roughly date from the time my dad was born, in the ’50s, through the late ’80s, and are pretty typical snapshots of the highlights of my grandparents’ life: traditional celebrations like birthdays and Christmases mixed in with vacations and visits from relatives. But after going through hundreds of speckled frames, I notice a different trend. A disproportionate number of the pictures seem to be what I can only describe as some sort of nature-centric portraits: my grandmother sitting on a rock surrounded by a sea of wood anemones, a common wildflower, to mark the coming of spring, or my grandfather standing next to a giant snowdrift in order to document a particularly heavy storm. Some show both of them posing in the mountains of Lapland, wearing jeans and clunky rubber boots—standard hiking gear of the time. Sometimes my grandmother would even photograph the plants in her garden, just to memorialize a particularly heavy bloom. In the small things in nature, she found a lifelong source of fascination and wonder.

  Many of the slides also show my grandparents eating outside, sometimes on a blanket in the grass, sometimes sitting in chairs at a small folding table that my grandfather used to haul around in the trunk of his yellow Volvo 240, along with a maroon leather shoulder bag packed with a thermos of piping-hot coffee, saft, cheese sandwiches, and cinnamon rolls. In some of the pictures, my grandparents have set up their table and chairs in a no-frills rest area near the road; in others, they have scored a million-dollar view over rolling pastures and farmland separated by ancient stone walls and dotted by tiny red houses with orange clay tile roofs. Sometimes they just pulled all the patio furniture from their small back porch and put it in the grass in the backyard. It was a simple setup, but judging by the looks on their faces, they might as well have been sitting in a five-star restaurant, sipping vintage Cristal and feasting on exquisite Russian caviar. To them, eating under the open sky was the finest dining experience imaginable.

  Later, I begin to appear in the images as well: petting a goat at the zoo, balancing on my first cross-country skis in my grandparents’ backyard, standing on a big rock in an old-growth forest. When I was little I didn’t reflect much on this, but as I got older I realized that they had taken me to just about every nature preserve, cultural heritage site, and national park within a two-hour drive, and then some. When they took me to Lapland, they made their infatuation with the flora and fauna of the rugged mountain landscape mine to keep forever.

  Back at the cemetery, I dig a hole for one of the purple pansies I’m holding while Maya hovers over my bent back, hoping to spot an earthworm. She immediately finds one and puts it in the palm of her hand. “Look, Nora! A worm!” she exclaims with such excitement that you’d think she’d found a tiny rainbow-colored unicorn. Luckily, I soon find another one for Nora, who holds it up against the sun and carefully inspects it. After I’ve planted both of the pansies, Maya and Nora gently put the worms down by the flowers and watch, transfixed, as they make their escape into the damp, dark soil. Then the girls take off to collect pinecones and lichens to decorate the grave. When they’re done, Maya examines it contentedly.

  “It looks nice. Too bad Farmor can’t see it,” she says.

  “Well, who knows? Maybe she can,” I offer.

  “Yeah, true. Maybe she can see us from up in the air.”

  Before we leave, Maya and Nora kick their shoes off, grab each other’s hands, and start walking around in an ever-faster spinning circle on top of the headstone, making an impromptu game out of my grandparents’ final resting place. My gut reaction is to become dismayed, and worry that somebody may see it and frown upon it. But then I think of Farmor and Farfar, and I know they would never find it disrespectful. In my mind I can almost hear my grandma saying, “Keep playing, my little trolls. Just keep playing.”

  The Digital Generation

  * * *

  There is a popular meme circulating on the internet, stating that “kids don’t remember their best day of t
elevision.” The meme has been re-created in many forms but usually features romantic images of an ideal childhood: kids with vintage backpacks walking down a wooded path; a boy and his dad sitting on a horse, watching a herd of cows; silhouettes of children running across a field toward the sunset. The author is unknown but the meme has been shared thousands of times, so the message obviously resonates with many. Although I clearly remember the day that I binge-watched The Thorn Birds while home sick from school in fifth grade as well as I remember frolicking in Lapland, there’s some truth to this meme. Studies show that we’re more prone to remember events that engage our whole body and all our senses. Nature, it turns out, is just the right place for that. That’s why, when researchers ask people to share memories from childhood, they often think of things that took place outdoors. Playing with friends in special hideouts, going on family camping trips, experiencing the elements.

  The meme also says a lot about our desire to give our children quality experiences in real life, away from screens like TVs, gaming consoles, DVDs, tablets, computers, smartphones, and the distractions of social media. Because if there was one thing my grandparents had going for them, it was the fact that they didn’t have to compete with an iPad.

  Maya was two years old when I bought my first iPhone, and it took her about that many minutes to figure out how to work it. Later, I installed a few games, thinking that they might come in handy while killing time at the dentist’s office. That was before I realized that touch screens were an electronic form of kiddie crack, more addictive to her than chocolate was to me. When she was three or four, we bought our first tablet, a Kindle that I figured could help us get through the roughly twenty-hour-long trips to Sweden now that I had both a preschooler and a baby in tow. Bad move. By the time she was five, Maya would wake me up at six o’clock on Saturday mornings, desperately pleading for her tablet so that she could get to the next level of Candy Crush Saga. The sound track alone made me long for the days when “I Love You” by Barney the purple dinosaur was the most commonly played tune in our home—no small feat, considering that this was allegedly the CIA’s preferred song for torturing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.